ONE Rivalry and Security in a New Era for US- China Relations JACQUES DELISLE AVERY GOLDSTEIN At the end of the 1970s, the United States of America and the Peo- ple’s Republic of China established formal diplomatic relations, and China, under Deng Xiaoping, adopted a transformational agenda of “reform and opening to the outside world.” During the four decades that followed, and despite occasional significant setbacks, the bilateral relationship became broader and deeper. “Constructive engagement” characterized much of Washington’s China policy, and Beijing pri- marily pursued a policy of integrating with a US- led post–World War II and, later, post– Cold War international order.1 By the later 2010s, however, the relationship had taken a dramatic, negative turn. Beijing had become more pointed in rejecting what it long has depicted as pernicious US efforts to limit China’s rise or shape its internal order. Under Xi Jinping, China also had grown more assertive in seeking to influence the international institutions that China earlier had joined without challenging the status quo. In Washington, many began to see a rising China as a strategic competitor or geostrategic adversary and a threat to the international 1 deLisle-Goldstein_After Engagement_i-viii_1-380.indd 1 3/4/21 5:01 PM 2 After Engagement order that the United States had led in creating and had long champi- oned. Once- reliable bipartisan support for constructive engagement gave way to calls to confront more forcefully a potentially serious chal- lenge from China.2 During Barack Obama’s presidency, some Amer- icans began to criticize engagement as a naive failure that did not serve US interests. Although skepticism about engagement was not new, it had been a minority view, mostly held by those at the left and right ends of the political spectrum. By the end of the Obama admin- istration, it was becoming a bipartisan consensus embraced by those nearer the center.3 Analysts, including contributors to this volume, began to assess, or reassess, US- China relations in terms— relative power, conflicting interests, and ideational struggle— that had been infrequently invoked in recent decades. Donald Trump’s election as president in 2016 brought to power a foreign policy team that flatly rejected established approaches to dealing with China. The Trump administration explicitly character- ized China as an adversary. Addressing the perceived threat to Amer- ican interests from China, US policy began to focus on preventing China from narrowing the still- substantial gap in economic wealth, technological prowess, and military power.4 The 2020 US presidential campaign and initial statements from Joe Biden and his foreign policy advisers indicate that these concerns will remain central to Washing- ton’s China policy. Changes in the US agenda—including pursuit of cooperation with China in limited areas and closer coordination with allies that share US concerns about China and its agenda—do not portend a return to constructive engagement or a reversal of the core elements of the bipartisan consensus for tougher China policies that had emerged by the mid-2010s.5 A RELATIONSHIP CREATED AND TRANSFORMED: NORMALIZATION AND THE ERA OF ENGAGEMENT Viewing the relationship in terms of conflicting great power interests looks, to some extent, like a case of “back to the future.” The Sino- American rapprochement that began in earnest in the late 1970s had its roots in the realist logic of Cold War international relations. The reciprocal opening between the United States under Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger and China under Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai deLisle-Goldstein_After Engagement_i-viii_1-380.indd 2 3/4/21 5:01 PM Rivalry and Security in a New Era for US- China Relations 3 was fundamentally about countering their common adversary, the Soviet Union, at a time when Moscow seemed poised to gain influ- ence (as the United States sought to extricate itself from the war in Vietnam) and when Sino- Soviet relations had reached a nadir (as was tangibly manifested in border clashes two years before Nixon’s path- breaking visit to China). There was no ideological affinity between a regime in Beijing that was in the middle of the Cultural Revolution decade and an administration in Washington that was led by a pres- ident who owed his initial political ascent to his anti- communist cre- dentials and maintained a formal security alliance with a Republic of China regime in Taipei still claiming to be the rightful government of all of China. With China’s policy of economic autarchy and the US’s policy of isolating communist states economically still in place, the beginnings of the trade and investment ties that would come to play so large a role in defining the bilateral relationship were several years in the future. Against this backdrop, the changes that defined the long era of constructive engagement were remarkable and transformative. In 1979, the United States established diplomatic relations with the Peo- ple’s Republic of China (PRC) and severed formal diplomatic and security ties with Taipei. The US granted China conditional “most favored nation” trading privileges (now called normal trading rela- tions), and the PRC adopted the first in a long series of increasingly liberal laws to allow inbound foreign investment (for which the United States quickly emerged as a major source). Washington had accepted Beijing’s resumption of the Chinese seat in the United Nations (and, thus, the PRC’s status as one of the veto- wielding five permanent mem- bers of the Security Council) in 1971, and from 1980 onward began to support China’s entry into other international institutions.6 During the nearly forty years that followed, US- China relations remained generally positive and China’s ties with the US, and a US- led and US- backed international order, developed across several di- mensions. The prevalent frameworks for assessing the increasingly impor tant bilateral relationship changed as well, moving away from concerns about the international distribution of power that had dom- inated the pre- normalization years. The US- China security relationship moved further out of the shadows of earlier conflicts: the direct military hostilities during the Korean War, the more limited and indirect confrontation during the deLisle-Goldstein_After Engagement_i-viii_1-380.indd 3 3/4/21 5:01 PM 4 After Engagement Vietnam War, and Maoist China’s support for left- leaning revolutions in the post- colonial world. With the end of the Cold War, the collapse of Moscow- backed regimes in Central and Eastern Europe, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself, the shared interest in checking the Soviet Union that had been the initial underpinning for warming US- China relations evaporated. Instead, during the 1990s, the US and China focused on new opportunities for affirmative cooperation, with the Clinton administration eventually referring to China as a possible strategic partner. This change reflected the perception that China and the United States did not pose serious security threats to one another. China’s growing international role prompted the Clinton administra- tion to undertake some modest hedging efforts, including steps to shore up US Cold War– rooted alliances in Asia in 1996–1997.7 But as late as the middle 1990s, China’s still- limited capabilities were not yet driving concern about its arrival as a peer competitor for the US.8 There were, to be sure, episodes of significant friction and limited- scale crises in US- China relations, including: the cross- Strait con- frontation coinciding with Taiwan’s first fully democratic presidential election in 1996, when Chinese missile tests prompted the US to dis- patch elements of the Seventh Fleet to the region; the US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during the NATO- led coalition’s intervention in the conflict in the former Yugoslavia in 1999; the 2001 collision of a Chinese air force jet with a US EP- 3 reconnaissance plane, leading to the forced landing and brief detention of the Amer- ican plane and crew; and resurgent tensions during the later 2000s between China and its maritime neighbors— several of them formal allies or close partners of the United States— as China moved to clar- ify and assert claims in the East and South China Seas. Many of these incidents reflected long- recognized conflicts between US and PRC in- terests in Asia and demonstrated that both sides were willing to take some risks to protect or advance those interests. Nevertheless, the overall security relationship remained relatively free of serious or protracted conflicts and perceived threats to fun- damental interests. China was still comparatively weak, which limited the relevance of prospective maritime competition in the Western Pacific.9 Both sides saw benefits in the bilateral relationship that out- weighed conflicting interests. The US military presence and alliance structure in Asia was not fundamentally at odds with Beijing’s high- priority interests during a period when China had neither the will nor deLisle-Goldstein_After Engagement_i-viii_1-380.indd 4 3/4/21 5:01 PM Rivalry and Security in a New Era for US- China Relations 5 the capacity to expand its reach, and when its primary foreign policy imperative was to secure a peaceful and stable international environ- ment in which to pursue economic development, partly through inte- gration with the global economy. Although Taiwan remained a chronic source of discord in US- PRC relations and, in Beijing’s view, a core question of sovereignty and, thus, national security, cross- Strait and triangular relations remained relatively manageable during the long period that followed the nor- malization of US- PRC relations. Beijing consistently condemned Washington’s robust informal support for Taiwan as improper US intervention in China’s internal affairs, but Beijing’s policy was to tolerate the cross- Strait status quo.